Technology is being developed which utilizes a continuous shooting function of a digital camera to consecutively shoot a plurality of images, stores them temporarily in a buffer memory, displays them slow sequentially at a display unit at time intervals longer than the shooting intervals in the continuous shooting, and enables a photographer to instruct storage during the slow display so as to store image data of an image displayed at the time of instruction of storage in an image storage medium etc. (for example, see Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication (A) No 2006-140892).
When shooting while viewing a live view image displayed on a display unit in real time, if the subject is moving fast etc., it is not necessarily easy to capture the best shot. By instructing storage while viewing the images of a subject displayed slow in this way, however, it becomes possible to more accurately capture the best shot. In the present specification, the function will be called a “slow display, shooting function” and shooting utilizing this function will be called “slow display shooting”.
In this regard, the capacity of the buffer memory used for temporary storage of images is restricted due to costs and other factors, so it is not possible to slow display more than the number of images defined in relation to this limited capacity of the buffer memory. Further, the subject being shot may be variously in motion or stationary. In the past, all images were written in the buffer memory without distinguishing between them.